Writing about the food, farmers, fishermen, and folk of Long Island's North Fork.

New York Times

05/10/2018

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Jack Josephson and Magda Saleh at home near Congdons Creek.

Even if Magda Saleh, Egypt’s first prima ballerina in her 20s and founding director of the Cairo Opera House and National Cultural Center in her 40s, had not placed a large bowl of sweet, salty roasted nuts in front of me, I would not have moved from her living room sofa overlooking Congdons Creek.

It wasn’t the view, which was magnificent. She was relating the story of her life, with bureaucratic intrigue, world political movements and revolution and war as a backdrop. Her husband, Jack Josephson, an Egyptologist and the man who brought her to Shelter Island, was there to add context and avail himself of the peanuts.

Magda told part of her story in an interview on March 13 in the New York Times Magazine and in a 2017 documentary called “A Footnote in Ballet History.” She will appear at the Shelter Island Library Saturday, September 15 at 2 p.m. for a screening and Q&A.

Magda’s mother was Scottish and her Egyptian father was a well-known scholar and educator. The only girl in a large family, Magda grew up and was and educated in Cairo in the 1950s.

Professional dancers in Egypt at the time were called “Oriental” — known also as belly dancers — and their art was considered to be close to prostitution. It was acceptable for little girls to study ballet as part of a well-rounded education, but never with a view to dancing professionally.

When Magda’s father realized she was determined to be a professional ballet dancer, he warned her that it would subject the family to a grave social risk.Egypt’s first minister of culture, Sarwat Okasha, was a hero to Magda then and now. Okasha had been a leader of the Egyptian Revolution and during the years Magda was trained as a ballerina, he was responsible for the establishment of an Egyptian ballet program.

Cairo’s theatrical and musical life was centered on a grand opera house. “People dressed up for the performances held there and became part of the spectacle. We were no strangers to performance,” Magda said. “Cairo was called Paris on the Nile.”

When the Bolshoi performed at the Cairo Opera House, Magda was there and was “just blown away by the virtuosity,” she said. “The ballet master was brought to our ballet class to watch and he called me over and said ‘I have news for you. You have talent, and next year a teacher will be coming from the Bolshoi and I advise you to audition.’”

Magda was invited to enroll in the program and became one of five Egyptian girls chosen to study in Russia, returning to become Egypt’s first prima ballerina, dancing leading roles. Her father attended her performances at the Cairo Opera House and enjoyed being congratulated, telling everyone, “I am Magda’s father.”

In addition to the social risks of a daughter who danced professionally, Magda’s parents worried about the physical stresses of ballet on her young body, a concern that proved prescient. During what would be the last year of Magda’s career as a performer, the Cairo company put on “Don Quixote,” and the short season required her to dance for 13 consecutive performances. “I don’t think any ballerina has done that,” she said. “When I went back to regular training, my leg wouldn’t bend. It just locked.”

She and her partner were scheduled to appear as guest artists with the Bolshoi in Russia and she was determined not to miss the opportunity. In the middle of this catastrophe, Magda heard that the Opera House was on fire. As she stood watching flames destroy the building, she knew any hope of continuing her career in Cairo went with it.

“The Russians invited me to the Black Sea to take the baths, and I made it through that season as guest artist,” she said. “But by the end of the last performance I knew I was done.”

Magda’s most radical act as a woman in Egypt in the late 1960s was a thing she did not do: get married. In a culture where fathers and husbands controlled womens’ lives, she had seen two of her colleagues marry at the insistence of their families and then quit ballet when the demands of family life became too great.

“I wasn’t interested,” she said.

At the time, any unmarried girl was considered risky lest she bring shame on her family, let alone a girl who was a professional dancer. But Magda’s parents supported her wish to remain single.

When suitors began to come around, her father had to entertain them. “At first he’d say, ‘She’s too young.’ And later when he couldn’t get away with that he’d say ‘She’s too busy,’” Magda said.

“That was exceptional. As conflicted as my parents were, they did everything to further my career.”

She left Egypt to study at UCLA when her performing career was over in spite of the fact that Egypt was still firmly in the sphere of Soviet political influence and the U.S. was seen as an enemy. She stayed in the States to complete a PhD at New York University before returning to Egypt in 1983. Magda remembers that period spent studying in the U.S. as “formative and transformative years.”

She became a professor and dean at the Higher Institute of Ballet in Cairo and when Egyptian President Mubarak accepted a $50 million grant from the Japanese government to build a new opera house and cultural center, Magda was asked to become founding director of the new center.

She planned the inaugural ceremonies, lobbied foreign diplomats for support from the international business community, took ambassadors for tours of the site where the center was being built and generated a constant buzz of favorable press.

Within months, she was sacked.

Magda went overnight from being talked up as a candidate for the next cultural minister of Egypt to being out of a job and unwelcome in her own country. “The new minister who invited and subsequently got rid of me may have felt threatened,” Magda said. “It ended very suddenly and I was an exile. I felt I had lost my country and my job.”

Magda had met Jack Josephson in 1978, at the Brooklyn Museum when she and her mother came to the museum looking for research materials to support Magda’s NYU dissertation. At the time Jack was married with children.

But 13 years later, Magda was back in the United States and looking for a job. She called Jack, then six years a widower, and they married in 1993.

“When we were seeing one another we were discreet,” Magda said. “When I finally decided, yes, I’ll get married, the news broke and it went like wildfire that ‘Jack Josephson has gone and married this Egyptian belly dancer.’ I’m afraid I was a bit of a disappointment. I couldn’t even offer them a shimmy.”

“When I married Jack, a whole new world opened up,” Magda said. She decided to leave dance history behind and turn her considerable skills to marriage and Egyptology, serving as an editor for Jack’s writing, which is centered on the art history of early Egypt, particularly sculpture.

Not long after Magda and Jack decided to marry, she began coming to Shelter Island on weekends. Now, 25 years later, they spend as much of their time in the house on Congdons Creek as possible, even though it means seeing friends in the city much less often.

“Peace. It changes you,” Magda said. “Here you can hear the blood tingle in your ears. It cleanses you.”

Three times Jack and Magda have led a group of friends from Shelter Island to Egypt. “We had been blathering about how wonderful Egypt was and we realized that we have a very special privilege in Egypt,” Jack said. “People recognize Magda on the street. I was referred to all around Egypt as ‘Magda’s husband.’”

She continues to serve her country as a cultural diplomat, bringing together exciting Egyptian artists and American audiences. She even brought Egyptian pianist Mohamed Shams to perform for the Shelter Island Friends of Music after arranging for his sold-out Carnegie Hall debut at Weill Recital Hall a couple of years ago.

Magda understands better than most people the difficult position of the performer caught between power and art. “So much talent in Egypt and we waste it,” she said. “We are proxies for the powers that are raging above us and we get to be shuffled around.”

Lightning Round — Magda Saleh

What do you always have with you? Photographs of my parents.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Here. We don’t leave.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? I have two, the Pyramid of Djoser, a step pyramid in the Saqqara necropolis and Seti at Abydos.

What exasperates you? Human obduracy. I saw it in Egypt over the decades … and in the U.S. now. What are we doing and why are we so bent on destroying ourselves?

Favorite book? ’The Lord of the Rings.’ I am fascinated by Tolkien, his imagination, his language and the fascinating world he wove out of whole cloth.Favorite food? Right now, these honey peanuts. I love eating. I am omnivorous.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Sarwat Okasha. A great son of Egypt.

Most respected elected official? President Obama and his wife Michelle. A remarkable couple

10/25/2017

There are a lot of trees around Lily Hoffman’s Shelter Island home, but that doesn’t really explain why squirrels invade her kitchen. What we do know is this, when Lily makes a certain kind of zucchini bread, the squirrels will come.

The heavenly scent of baking cinnamon and nuts may be part of the attraction. Lily first noticed the effects of this particular recipe on the local squirrels when she saw a bushy-tailed friend peering into the kitchen through the screen door while she cooked. The next time she whipped it up, a squirrel appeared at her screen door again. He seemed hungry, and rattled the screen. The next time she made it, while it cooled, she stepped out of the kitchen, and returned to find the squirrel inside the house, apparently taking advantage of a tear in the screen to personally inspect the loaf.

She urged me to try making the zucchini loaf (it is delicious) but first make sure the doors are closed.

Is there a rational explanation for the interest of squirrels in this particular baked good? According to biologists, squirrels crave salt during their mating season, which in the Northeast is fall, and there is a good amount of salt in this recipe. Of course, squirrels also gather nuts, but generally the nuts are freestanding, not baked into a sweet. To be on the safe side, I used pecans instead of walnuts, and although Lily’s recipe, which comes from her friend Kay, calls for cinnamon, I made it with cinnamon and ground cardamom hoping to throw the squirrels off the scent.

A toasted slice of zucchini bread makes a great breakfast whether you are a squirrel or not.

09/02/2016

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Bob Markell in his attic studio with a self-portrait, painted, he said, when he was angry with himself.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter on September 2, 2016

When Bob Markell was 8 years old he got the measles, and was treated by a doctor who praised his young patient’s artistic ability. “He was just being nice, but I believed him,” Bob said.

From then on, he was determined to be a painter, but his father objected, “You are going to live in an attic, you are going to starve, and I’m not going to pay for it,” he was told.

More than eight decades later, Bob’s father’s predictions have come true except for the starving part. First came 50 years as a designer, producer and executive in television, five Emmys, and distinguished work such as art director for the film “12 Angry Men” in 1957, and the first televised production of “The Nutcracker.” Since the early 1990s, Bob has focused on fine art, and in August welcomed visitors to his well-lit attic studio filled with sketches and paintings during the ArtSI studio tour.

Bob was born in 1924 and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts. His mother had emigrated from Russia, but his father’s family was “more Americanized,” and deeply cynical. “My father had a negative view,” Bob said. “He really didn’t believe that when people were nice to him they meant it.”

Bob went to Northeastern University and graduated in 1944 with a degree in civil engineering and some work experience at a Boston architecture firm. He and everyone he knew wanted to go fight Hitler, but asthma prevented him from combat; he ended up at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island doing stress analysis on airplanes. After World War II, Grumman began manufacturing canoes, but lacking the same enthusiasm for peacetime canoes he had for wartime airplanes, Bob left in hope of more creative work.

He and two roommates had been living in a house near Grumman when he found all of his belongings on the porch. The landlady declared she didn’t want foreigners (i.e. Bob, a Jew) in her home. So in 1946, Bob and his friends moved to New York City, and he decided to try his hand at set design.

His first experience was at a summer-stock theater in the Catskills, a bowling alley that had been converted to a theater, where he painted a set but failed to seal it with the adhesive known as “rabbit glue.” By the next day all the paint had run off, and someone said, “You didn’t forget to put the rabbit glue on, did you?”

“I didn’t forget,” he said. “I didn’t know.”

Bob met his wife, Joan Harris, in 1948 when she showed up as a volunteer stagehand for an Equity Library Theatre production in New York. Bob was the scenic designer. A Chicago native, Joan was a Northwestern University theater program graduate and moved to New York to pursue acting. When she didn’t get cast, she dressed the set.

“I said, ‘Listen, any of you guys know how to light a show?’” Bob said. “And she went up the ladder, and was hanging on, and I said, ‘Anyone who would climb up and hang lights for me is worth knowing.’” They married in 1949.

Bob and Joan have two children, Mariana Markell, a nephrologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Denis Markell, a dramatist and novelist, whose latest book, a young adult novel called “Click Here to Start,” was published in July.

In 1966, Bob was a producer on the classic courtroom drama series, “The Defenders,” when he worked with Dustin Hoffman.

The young actor’s role was a New York accountant, and Bob told Hoffman — at the time considered too homely to play a leading man — that he’d have to cut his long hair for the part. Hoffman insisted that Bob be present during the haircut so Bob could listen to him scream (something about Samson and Delilah). “They gave him a really nice haircut and he looked great,” said Bob. “I think he got the job on “The Graduate” because of the haircut, so he kind of owed me.”

The day Bob got the assignment that would lead to his fifth Emmy, he almost blew it. He said he had been drinking when the call came from CBS higher-ups to come discuss a promotion and new assignment.

“I couldn’t get any ice cubes and I heard myself say, ‘I can’t come now, I’m waiting for my refrigerator to be fixed.’” He managed to make it to the meeting, was promoted to executive producer, and assigned to a project called “Bicentennial Minutes,” a series of hundreds of 60-second historical sketches that aired from 1974 through 1976.

CBS had undertaken “Bicentennial Minutes” as public service announcements; under Bob’s direction they were each tiny dramas with a beginning, middle and end. Norman Mailer, President Gerald Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, and First Lady Betty Ford were among the celebrities who participated, and in 1975 Bob received an Emmy as executive producer of the series.

When Tennessee Williams was asked to do a New Year’s Eve Bicentennial Minute, the hard-drinking writer insisted on writing his own script, but the script didn’t materialize and it came time to shoot. “He was so smashed you couldn’t believe it,” Bob said. “He just looked into the camera and said, ‘This is Tennessee Williams and I want to offer all of you a happy, happy New Year and a happy holiday!’ Someone asked me, ‘Who wrote this thing?’”

In 1960, Bob and Joan were living in Brooklyn Heights when friends suggested a visit to Shelter Island. They visited, bought a house on the Island, and in 1976 they moved into their current home on Midway Road, an antique beauty built by a whaler, Captain Samuel Sherman, in the early 19th century.

In October 1977, Dashiell Hammett’s “The Dain Curse,” starring James Coburn, with Bob as executive producer, became the first major motion picture to be filmed on Shelter Island.

Bob told The New York Times that the absence of traffic lights and antennas and the plentiful supply of photogenic Victorian homes was a factor in CBS’s decision to film here, but more important was the willingness of local people, such as Williette Piccozzi, Louis Cicero and then Supervisor Leonard Bliss to support the production as extras, with haircuts — Louis’ cut, short with sideburns, became known as “The Dain Cut” — and with their tolerance of the weeks-long disruption of Island life.From his first visits to Shelter Island, Bob felt his creative juices flow.

His friends here were members of the Shelter Island Community of Artists, including Gus Mosca, and Luiz Coelho, now gone.

“They were marvelous, and helped me more than anyone else,” Bob said. “I miss them terribly.”

In his painting, Bob tries to reveal the emotions in his subjects. “You have to feel something,” he said. “Every time I get angry at myself, I do a self-portrait. When I paint someone else, I’m very concerned about insulting them, so I don’t do portraits that well, but I love painting myself.”

Last Sunday afternoon four deer loitered by the screened porch of the house on Midway Road. A six-point buck sat regally in the grass, with two does standing nearby and between them a spotted fawn on long, gawky legs. A cottontail rabbit hopped nearby.

Even by Shelter Island standards, this was an extraordinary assemblage. Did these ruminants sense they were gathered under the gaze of a celebrated designer, and formed this bucolic tableau, hoping to catch the artist’s eye?

My parents, former groovy college professors, had gone to this resort for years. It wasn’t hard to understand that skinny-dipping in those quiet waters made them feel free and young. But my father had died two years before and my mother, now a slim, attractive 71-year-old widow, wanted to relive her best times, with children and grandchildren in tow. Any daughter with a shred of decency would do this for her mother.

So, easily handling the lightest travel bag I had ever packed, I found myself standing at the gate of a nudist colony at Leucate, France, on a blazing July day, sweating through a cotton shirt. Somewhere inside the gates, my mother, younger sisters and their four female children had already settled into the rental apartment. (Unlike me, my sisters weren’t fazed by this vacation. They both became college professors, too, and although they didn’t walk around their homes without clothing, I’m pretty sure I was the only one of us who had ever worn pantyhose.)

As I walked through the complex, looking for my relatives, I saw families enjoying the pool and the beach, sitting on benches — all naked except for sunglasses and chalky dabs of sunscreen. People stared at my clothing. A bare man on his balcony, apparently doing some home repair, put down his power drill and regarded me sourly. Finally, I heard my mother, walking briskly toward me, calling my name. I hugged her loosely, not daring to squeeze or look down.

Leucate is not the Riviera. Its nudist beaches are a destination for budget vacationers, mostly European families, who prefer to relax undressed. I learned that in this place, covered skin was forbidden outside the apartment. If you wanted to wear a burlap sack inside, go ahead. Outside, it was rude not to be nude. Nobody even thought of trying to go for a dip in the pool wearing a swimsuit.

I decided to wear clothes inside our beachside rental. One of my nieces wore her underwear in solidarity with me. In some ways, this was like our usual family reunions: I was the cook, in a shirt and apron. In other respects it was different: the complete absence of our husbands and sons, and having to get undressed to go outside.

On the beach each morning, I spread out a towel and lay on the sand, looking like a cod fillet in a fish market. A fillet with stretch marks and an odd pattern of moles across my middle. How I longed to wrap the towel around myself.

The resort operated an entire buff village, with stores, a laundry (not that there was much to wash) and even a restaurant. We never ate there, but it must have been upscale because at the tables, each chair had a thin round of tissue paper (presumably disposable) for the comfort of bare-bottomed diners.

When we ran out of fresh fruit, I went into the small grocery store. “Maybe I’m starting to adjust,” I thought, as I shopped haunch to haunch with the other customers. I bought a small watermelon, and found that my imperfect French embarrassed me more than the sight of my breasts as I forked over the euros.

But after I got back to the apartment and cut into the fruit — so perfect on the outside — I found it was rotten within. My thriftiness overwhelmed my modesty, and I removed my T-shirt, stripped off my briefs and marched back to the store. If it was hard to buy produce without clothing and with a poor command of the language, it was more difficult to return it. Perhaps the poignant sight of a flat-chested, middle-aged American woman seeking to buy a voluptuous French melon melted the icy heart of the clerk. She found me another watermelon.

As I made my way back to the apartment, I passed an outdoor shower, where beachgoers rinsed off before going inside. A man about my age, balanced on one leg, was carefully rinsing the sand off his other leg — a prosthetic that he held under the shower like a baby.

This was the moment when I should have accepted my public nudity. After all, if a one-legged man is O.K. with his body, then a dermatologically challenged woman should be O.K. too. I was not.

I could guess why my parents loved this place. This trip was my mother’s gift; a way to show me the beautiful people she and my dad had been when they were together.

But instead of being grateful, I was anxious, lumpy, not the least groovy. The sight of my mother’s bare body made me as dizzy as the sight of my own blood. It was too much truth.

Still, as a devoted daughter, I would do anything for my mother. Once.

The next summer, my husband and I took our boys on vacation to the Canadian Rockies. I stuffed my luggage with socks, thermal underwear and an enormous flannel nightgown. I wore every single garment. My skin never saw daylight.